Beyond the Palette

This is how I felt that night (muscles are accurate btw)    It was 2 am, which meant that I had reached the stage of night where everything starts to become either funny or like a hallucination to me. For some reason however, I didn't feel high - I was feeling philosophical. As I read through the required chapter of The Best We Could Do, I felt like an absolute genius, analzying every word and every stroke of paint on the pages. And then, out of nowhere, a bright, metaphorical lightbulb appeared over my head.  Thats when it hit me: the title,  The Best We Could Do,  brings a comletely different meaning and perspective when viewed through an artistic lens. Bui's entire memoir is essentially an act of doing her best: utilizing art, empathy, and research to connect with her audience at a deeper level. In fact, she even admits to this in the preface, acknowledging that she didn't feel like she had "solved the storytelling problem of how to present history in a ...

  November 8th, 2025 Outside, it's 36 degrees F. In the news: Russia launches missiles and drone barrages against Ukraine, resulting in power outages and casualties. Police officer shot and killed in North Carolina hospital .  This saturday, HOSA regionals took place in Troy High. Music. Lights up. Classroom. Dimly lit. Filled with students.  Jayden (handsome asian boy with a chiseled face), luscious hair. He has a crowd of girls behind him, all wanting to get with him. Students sit in their usual seats, having small talk before class starts, Mrs. Valentino (AP Language teacher) sitting comfortably on her rolly chair. The bell rings. Mrs. Valentino: So, did everyone do their homework? Class falls silent and everyone slyly glances at each other in nervousness. Jayden has a smug expression on his face and raises his hand high. Jayden: Of course I did Mrs. Valentino. In fact, I believe I found a really great allusion that even relates to Sweat.  Mrs. Valentino: That sou...

Quietly sitting in my usual seat, I wait as Mrs. Valentino starts to slowly pass out the vocabulary quizzes to everyone. Of course, with my luck, I get the quiz the very last. Nervous, I look down to take a peep at my vocabulary quiz and one big. ugly word flashes through my mind: "Shit." How did these sentences relate in any way to the definitions that I had studied? Did I study the wrong terms? Did I study the wrong set of vocab words? Did I just.... happen to forget? The scenario I just described is very realistic to many people that had to take any form of a memorization based quiz (not me of course since i'm the ultra mega handsome cool super buff Jayden Paik). You study your butt off the night before, only getting a couple of hours of sleep, but then you walk into the test your teacher hands out and all you see is what can be considered equivalent to a caveman looking at calculus for the first time.  No matter how hard you study, you always somehow forget the one to...

Dedicated to my beautiful husband Paul Lei.      Running fast along the road, I finally reached Gatsby’s house. As I dashed to his backyard, I noticed a blotch of dark red, slowly filling the crystal clear waters of his pool. Anxiously glancing towards the source of this disgusting sight, I saw Gatsby. "GATSBY!!! NOOOOO!! WHO DID THIS TO YOU!!!!" I screamed as I ran towards his lifeless body, drifiting around the pool like a lotus flower on a lake. Tears dripping off my cheeks, I was running over to his corpse when I felt the ground seemingly rumble, stopping me in my tracks. It was Gatsby. His body was vibrating hard, creating rough waves in the pool and knocking over plant pots nearby. "G-Gatsby? What's going o-" suddenly, Gatsby's body soared into the air, leaving a big green cloud behind. It turns out, he had a lot of gas pent up, waiting to be released, and when he died, his body wasn't able to hold it back anymore and unleashed the biggest, stinkie...

  Literature is often read, not performed. However this week in AP Language, we turned Chapter 7 of The Great Gatsby into a skit. Seeing the characters act out the scenes instead of reading words on a page transformed the story for me. Suddenly, Gatsby's desperation for Daisy wasn't just print on a page - it was shaking in someone's voice, or expressions that paint the picture of the scene. You see, acting is like p;ainting emotions, the same way an artist uses colors and textures to show sentiment within their artoworks. Would The Scream  be the same without it's unique artstyle and brushstrokes? Definitely not. The same way you can emphasize different parts of a painting with different colors and heavinesses, we can emphasize different scenes of a book through acting.  i think what stood out the most to me was how each group portrayed the same scenes in different ways. For example, our group was... well very unserious to say the least. We used modern slang and made o...

Take a look at the world around you. What do you see? From what I can guess, you'll see drywall, the screen on which you're reading this blog, and probably other things in your room too. All these things also have one attribute in common: they all have color!.. obviously. Of course, like I did just now, colors can be a descriptive attribute, but color isn't always just an adjective – it can also convey emotions. For instance, blue represents sorrow, red represents anger, yellow represents joy, etc. Even renowned artists take colors and the emotions they represent into consideration when creating pieces. Like in Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, where the deep blue of the sky represents the tranquility and vastness of the night, while the yellow of the st ars and moon represents hope and divine energy.  Similarly , i n The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, colors serve the purpose of conveying emotions and traits of characters in hidden ways. For example, when Nick...